It was a calm evening. Nothing out of the ordinary was afoot, and the multitude of everyday businesses were in the process of closing up shop. It had, for all intents and purposes, been an extra ordinary day, where most that of the things that usually happens in a day happened, and where very few of the unusual things that could happen did not. In short, in the annals of history, this day so far would not be mentioned.

Then, the aliens arrived.

One moment, they were not there. The next, they were. Not only as a massive fleet hovering in the skies, but as faces on screens everywhere. They had something to say, and they said it.

“People of Earth. You were right. We have been experimenting on your kind for some time now, and you will be pleased to know that your contribution to science has been immense. However, one of our most recent experiments have gone out of hand, and we now need your help to abort it. We are, of course, speaking of the government of the political body known as the United States. For many decades, it has been a hotbed of experimentation in dysfunctional governance, and we have learned much from your contribution. This recent state of things, however, will yield very little knowledge and too much suffering to justify. We have appeared to give you the justification you need to set things right. Your scientists will have the data needed to verify that we were here. Your fate is now in your hands. God bless America.”

All around the world, a stunned silence hovered where the aliens had been mere moments before. Then, in a house the color of white, a small voice said:

We ran the numbers, and found out that implementing full scale socialism is too massive an undertaking to be accomplished quickly. However, during the course of our investigation we found an alternate route that arrives at the same destination, with a few minor differences. Instead of managing the redistribution of wealth through central committee, we outsource the process to private institutions. The details can be found in the attached document, but the short summary is this: everyone get to be employed in a top-level position for ten to fifteen days, and get to keep the salary earned in full. Given the eyebrow-raising salary levels of these positions, we should see massive amounts of redistribution in only a couple of years or so.

It should be noted that this can be done in parallel with the traditional approach, as per the attached document.

She wrote the kind of newspaper articles tourists stumbled themselves through on their improvised linguistic feet as they tried to get a sense of the place there were almost in.

She made it all up. All of it. It didn’t matter – it was the mood of the piece that mattered, not the facts. Visitors care about facts; tourists want discourse thrown at them with sufficient candor to seem like a real thing.

And she, she could sling bull with the best of them. The fact that very few had caught on attested to that, the one fact in all her articles.

Oh yes, there is secret knowledge. There is in fact lots of it. You will be interested to know that there is also forbidden knowledge, and that this is different from secret knowledge. The secret stuff is mostly boring trivia that does not concern or interest those that are not involved directly with it. If you find out something like that, nothing really happens, other than that you’d have reason to ask Old Man Frank about his prostate cancer that he hasn’t told anyone about. It’s secret, but most of it is irrelevant to your lived experience.

The forbidden stuff, however, is forbidden for a reason. A very specific reason, at that. This reason is that nothing engages and excites the mind like being told not to do something. By making it publicly known that certain things are forbidden to know, a whole lot of attention is brought to bear in that specific area, and thus we can expect the overall discussion about this thing to advance by leaps and bounds. Forbidding knowledge is like giving it a vitamin injection – like a disturbed anthill, it bristles with sudden activity.

There is a third category of knowledge, though, beyond secret and forbidden. This is radioactive knowledge, which irradiates everything it comes into contact with. It cannot be safely handled, and it cannot be stored in a secure manner. Once it exists in the world, it creates waves and ripples, turns heaven into hell and hell into heaven. Nothing survives contact with it, and the only safe way to deal with it is to never know anything about it at all. It is the stuff of suicide cults. Only death and destruction follows from it, which is why we never talk about that stuff. Even by omission.

And that, my friend, is why you are not allowed to know the truth about the moon landing, chemtrails, or the fact that the Earth is flat. Under no circumstances are you to continue your investigations into these areas.

It was a strange moment in time. Suddenly, a whole new world of interfaces opened up, and a whole lot of them had to be designed, fast. No one knew what apps were for or what they were supposed to look like, but they knew they were supposed to have at least one. And to have an app, you needed an app design. Fast, before the competition could get an advantage edgewise.

The proliferation of new apps in combination with the lack of a precise vision of how these things were supposed to look, meant that a non-trivial amount of copying went into the design process. Someone made something that looked sorta kinda okay, and in the haste to ship something, anything, it would have to do. Copy, edit, ship. As time went on, it went from copies of copies to copies of copies to copies, until, at last, every app looked pretty much like every other app.

Over the years, the squad had become increasingly proficient at its chosen task. What had begun as a simple joke, an offhand gesture, a token remark, had grown to become a whole reason for being. First it had been conventional spelling, then grammar, then – in a surprise move – avocadoes. Emboldened by these successes, they moved on to more abstract targets. The job market, the notion of living in the pieces of real estate you bought, the traditional family structure. Entire social and economic structures, once thought to be the very foundations of our society, had fallen by their hand.

With each kill, the Millennials grew more powerful and confident. And now, at the height of their conviction, they knew just what to do. They had the next target in their sights.

For every hobby, there is an equal and opposite counter-hobby. For some people, this is more true than others, and it is especially true for this one particular person. His main purpose in life was to enter into fandoms of the most various kinds, and then introduce subtle yet perceptible quirks which over time would come to define the communities in question. Small gestures, words and habits of contextual emphasis which make sense to those of the in-group, but increasingly little sense to those in the out-group.

Granted, this is a process that occurs naturally within any grouping with a sufficient density of communicative frequency. His specialty was to find the specific points where this process took place and ever so gently nudge it along. A word of encouragement here, a nod of acknowledgement there, a callback to previous occurrences after just enough time to jog everyone’s memory. It was subtle, discreet and – to a surprising extent – super effective.

What he did not know was that he had been found out, and ever so gradually accrued a fandom of his own. The fandom did not stalk him per se, but it did recognize his handiwork on sight, and were omnipresent enough to have eyes wherever he was likely to be. It watched, observed and – at times when he seemed less enthused than usual – nudged him along, ever so gently.

“Well, it’s more of a server hall than anything else, really. There are some sections dedicated to physical objects, but most of the space is occupied by computers. Over the multitudes of years, it would seem the only reliable way to become extremely long-lived is to shed your mortal coil in the most literal of senses”

“Does it work? Corporeal immortality, I mean”

“We don’t know. Those who manage something close to it are not interested in these archives. Those who bother to answer our questions say something about not being interested in the playthings of fleeting beings and different frames of reference. Then they go dark”

“Huh. Makes sense”

“Ah, here we are. You asked about the most extreme longevity measures we knew of, and here it is. The Boredom Continuity, we like to call it”

“That has some worrying connotations, if you don’t mind me saying”

“They figured that any upload-based immortality would be limited by the lifetime of the machines they uploaded themselves to, so they added another parameter: subjective time. Time is not merely a thing that happens, but something that is experienced – some things go past in an instant, while other things take forever. They thought that if they could find a way to harness the properties that make time go past slower, they’d maximize their immortality in terms of living, as it were”

“So the name… by the gods!”

“Yes. I do not envy them their particular brand of immortality one bit”

“Aha! I found something! Though I don’t think it’s a ghost, truth to tell”

“How so?”

“Well, it made fun of the way I dress, and challenged me to a game of riddles”

“That… that could be a ghost, couldn’t it?”

“It could be. But ghosts mainly live in the past, trapped in their own memories. It’s what makes them ghosts. This also means they don’t pay attention to other things, such as this admittedly ridiculous T-shirt.”

“So it’s more aware of fashion than you. That is a low bar, to be sure. But if it is not a ghost, then what are we dealing with?”

“I think it’s a fairy, and that we under no circumstances whatsoever are to deal with it. I say this because I think I accidentally made a deal with it, and gave it free residence in exchange for a passable knowledge of fashion”

“Computer fairies, you say? Who would have thought?”

[miscellaneous ambient noises]

“Wanna go buy better clothes to go with that new and improved fashion sense of yours?”

The event is imminent, yet long in arriving. Anyone with even the slightest of foresight could have seen it coming and taken appropriate measures to prevent it.

Yet, here we are.

It is way too late too late to change anything now. The wheels have spun too long, the circular processes with accumulative effects have had too much time to pile up. We are stuck in this potentiality, and have to ride it out until the end.

The only thing that can save us is a message back in time, to prevent the chain of events that led us here. Fortunately, the chains is boring, repetitive and based upon making the same bad choice over and over again. As we’ve discovered during the course of our investigations, it only takes one single break of this chain to break it, so we should be able to prevent things with a single intervention. A single, well-crafted message, arriving at the right moment.

With this in mind, I set out to write a message to myself. I ought to know, right?

* * *

Huh. Strange. There is a message here that I do not remember writing. It is definitely from me – I can recognize myself all over it. But it is also to me. And it references things that make no sense, and urges me to make life changes for no real good reason.

I must have been more tired than I thought during that last writing all-nighter. Especially that part about the shoes. I like my shoes.